A league table of newspapers and magazines which have paid private detectives to obtain illegal information about celebrities and other individuals was published yesterday. The Daily Mail came top.

Richard Thomas, the information commissioner with the job of protecting people's privacy, compiled the report from evidence found by his investigators during a raid on a private detective who was working undercover for a string of newspapers and celebrity magazines.

The detective, Stephen Whittamore, sold information he obtained from the police national computer until he was exposed and convicted in 2005. More than 60 Daily Mail journalists had bought 982 separate pieces of information from Whittamore and his associates, according to Mr Thomas's figures. The Mail's sister titles, the Evening Standard and the Mail on Sunday, also featured in the top 10.

Last night, the Mail's owners, Associated Newspapers, dismissed the league table as "utterly meaningless" as it was a snapshot based on the activities of one detective agency. A spokesman said the data came "from an inquiry into the activities of one particular agency nearly five years ago which resulted in four people, not journalists, receiving conditional discharges".

Other newspapers in the table include the Sunday People, the Daily Mirror, the Sunday Times and the Observer (which is owned by the Guardian Media Group).

Mr Thomas, who has accused the tabloids of driving a black market which destroys people's privacy, decided to publish the league table after what he calls "disappointing" talks with editors on the Press Complaints Commission, the newspapers' self-regulatory body.

The editors have refused to rewrite their code, he says, and some oppose his call for criminal penalties great enough to act as a deterrent. He adds: "Freedom of speech is not freedom to break the law by bribery or deception where there is no public interest justification." He writes that he unsuccessfully asked the editors' committee, chaired by the Murdoch executive Les Hinton, "to make it clear that it is unacceptable without an individual's consent, to obtain information about their private life by bribery, impersonation or subterfuge" unless there was a clear public interest.

He added: "It is difficult to imagine a prosecution - let alone a conviction - of any journalist able to show that he or she was pursuing a story to prevent or detect crime, to expose public impropriety or was otherwise acting in the public interest."

One of the most prolific users of private detectives on the list is Best magazine, owned by a subsidiary of the US Hearst group. It is aimed at middle-aged women. Twenty of its staff bought information at least 130 times. Yesterday, Michelle Hather, the editor, declined to comment.

Glenn "Trigger" Mulcaire, a private detective who worked for the Murdoch-owned News of the World, is awaiting sentence for hacking into voicemails of the royal family and other celebrities, along with the paper's royal reporter, Clive Goodman. This week, a private detective from Surrey was sentenced to community service after admitting obtaining details of mobile phone bills in divorce cases. Last month another team of Cambridgeshire "blaggers" making bogus phone calls admitted working for City law firms in business disputes.

Roger Alton, editor of the Observer, said: "Yes, the Observer has used the services of an outside agency in the past, and while there were strong public interest defences for most of those cases, it is possible that some of the inquiries did not sufficiently fit that criteria. As a result, I have now taken steps to ensure that no inquiries will be made through outside agencies unless I believe that there is a compelling public interest to do so."

Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre, who sits on the PCC, has told his journalists "that they must observe the law when seeking information" since the information commissioner started to raise concerns about abuses this year.

His spokesman added: "Associated Newspapers, in common with all newspapers and broadcasters, and many other organisations, including lawyers, use search agencies to obtain information entirely legitimately from a range of public sources ... In addition, the law specifically makes provision for journalists making inquiries in the public interest."

Paul Ashford, the editorial director of the Express newspapers, said: "I've spoken to our editor and cannot provide any instances of our having obtained information this way." A spokesman for Trinity Mirror, the owner of the Mirror, the Sunday Mirror and the People, declined to comment.